This summer, the Team-FT £5500 Prize Money Event in Brighton, United Kingdom, drew as wide an age range as you’re likely to see. The tournament, held from July 30 to August 4 at the Preston Lawn Tennis Club, attracted entrants aged 11 to 72, and was a genuinely open mixed-singles competition. Its 64-player draw (48 males and 16 females) used Universal Tennis Ratings (UTR) to ensure well-matched competition, regardless of the players’ sexes or ages. The £1800 top prize went to Former British #2 and Davis Cup player Joshua Goodall, who defeated fellow Brit Matthew Short in the final.
The opening round’s first match pitted the youngest entrant, 11-year-old
Talitha Mitchell, against Chris Evans, a 72- year-old man who is not only a good player, but “as tricky as they come,” according to tournament director Barry Fulcher, a former ATP player and current teaching professional at Preston. The unusual pairing split their first two sets before Mitchell prevailed in a 10-point super-tiebreaker. (In her next match, she again split the opening sets but this time lost the super-tiebreaker to her six-foot, six-inch male opponent, Lawrence Eke.) “Players have to respond to opponents of varied ages and genders,” Fulcher says. “Athletes with different skill sets, and styles they aren’t used to dealing with. They really learn a lot.”
Fulcher divided the draw into five divisions based on UTR levels, with the fifth one including UTRs of 5.00 to 7.00 and the top flight’s players all rated above 13.00. Only the fifth division embraced a wider in UTR range than 1.50. Athletes who continued to win could work their way up into matches in higher and higher divisions. The upper reaches included players like Ukrainian WTA pro Marianna Zakarlyuk, who won the female “bonus prize” of £500 by beating Julie Terziyska of Bulgaria after both had lost second-division matches.
About half of the entrants, says Fulcher, were players either at or headed to college in the United States. These included Ben Draper, son of the Lawn Tennis Association’s former CEO, Roger Draper. One British collegian, Josef Dodridge, who attends the University of Wisconsin at Madison, eked out a tight two-set victory over Simon Dickson, who plays on Great Britain’s over-35 men’s national team, which Fulcher captains. (As a junior, Dickson had posted wins over Marat Safin and Lleyton Hewitt.) Before his match, Dodridge noted that “Everyone’s at a similar level, so every first-round match is going to be tough to win.”
Overall, as the draws progressed, “there were very few one-sided matches,” Fulcher says. “UTR is a much more accurate and current system, rating-wise, than we have here in the U.K. It’s a much healthier system that promotes playing and competing hard. Going forward, I’m looking to run a series of different UTR events, catering to players of all levels. It’s something for the future here, that’s for sure.”
Rockin’ in Rockville
Like the Brighton event, the
$6,000 UTR National Clay Court Championships in Rockville, Maryland used the staggered-entry system, placing higher-rated players at more advanced positions in the draw. Incoming University of Virginia student Kyrylo Tsygura won the title, beating Luca Corintelli, a recent University of Virginia graduate, in the semis and Quinton Vega of Brooklyn, New York in the final. Skylar Morton of Bethesda, Maryland, another recent Virginia grad, won the women’s bonus pool.
"You keep going until you reach your maximum level."
“From a coach’s perspective, the UTR system is great,” says tournament director Bruce Lipka. “You saw how people played under pressure. And the spectator in me also felt it was a great event. There were so many close matches.” The
tournament kept feeding players forward in the draw as they won (“You keep going until you reach your maximum level,” Lipka explains). Meanwhile, the staggered-entry system was “incredibly efficient,” he says. And the tourney’s $2,000 first prize was an attractive one. “Playing Futures tournaments, you might not make $2,000 in six months,” says Lipka.
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